There are still several ways of making the ghost. Where the sitter is careless, or an enthusiastic Spiritualist, the old tricks (substitution of plates, etc.) are used; but there are new tricks to meet the critical. The ghost may be painted in sulphate of quinine or other chemicals on the ground-glass screen. Such a figure is invisible when it is dry. There may be a trick dark-slide, with a plate which will appear in front of yours. If the photographer develops it for you, he can skilfully get a ghost on it by holding another plate against yours (pretending to see how it is developing) in the yellow light. If you develop it yourself, you use his dish, which is often an ingenious mechanism. It has glass sides or a glass bottom, and, while the whole thing is covered up during development, secret lights impress the ghost on it. An actual case of this sort was exposed in Pearson's Weekly on January 31, 1920.
When the Spiritualist airily assures us that he has guarded against all these things (some of which could not be seen at all) we have to remember that Spiritualist literature teems with cases in which, we are told, "all precautions against fraud were taken," yet sooner or later the fraud is discovered. But the possibilities are not yet exhausted. I once saw a remarkable photograph which Sir Robert Ball had taken of the famous old ship, the Great Eastern. Along the side of it, in enormous letters, was the name "Lewis"; yet this name was totally invisible to the naked eye when one looked at the ship. A coat of paint had been put over the name—the ship had been used by Lewis's as an advertisement—and concealed it from the eye, yet the sensitive plate registered it. No scrutiny of the camera or the studio or the dark room would reveal conjuring of that sort. In fine, there is the possibility of some compound of radium, or radio-paint, being used at one or other stage in the process.
No sensible man will pay serious attention to spirit photographs until one is taken in these conditions; neither plates nor any single part of the apparatus shall belong to or be touched by the medium. The spirit photographer shall be brought to an unknown studio, and shall not be allowed to do more than, under the eye of an expert observer, lay his hand, at a sufficient distance from the lens, on the outside of a camera which does not belong to him. That has not been done yet. Until it is done fraud is certainly not excluded; and any man who uses the medium's own premises and apparatus is courting deception.
That the ghost on a photograph often resembles a dead relative of the sitter will surprise no sensible person. It is well known that mediums collect such photographs, as well as information about the dead. Mr. Carrington describes in his Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism the elaborate system they have. They have considerable knowledge of likely sitters in their own town. In fact, I have clearly enough traced in some cases that they first gathered information about a man, and then got an intermediary to persuade him to visit them. He, of course, tells everybody afterwards that the medium "could not possibly" know anything about him. Sometimes a Spiritualist takes the precaution of going to a spirit photographer in a distant town. If he is quite able to conceal his identity, he will get nothing, or only a common or garden ghost. But he makes an appointment for a sitting in a few days to try again, and gives his name and address; and the next mail takes a letter to a medium in his town asking for information and photographs. As I have previously said, when the Berlin police arrested Frau Abend and her husband they found an encyclopædic mass of information about possible sitters.
A case, with which I may conclude this section, is given by Dr. Tuckett in his Evidence for the Supernatural (pp. 52-3). Mr. Stead was once delighted to find the ghost of a "brother Boer" on a photograph, and the clairvoyant photographer mystically informed him that he "got" the name "Piet Botha," and gathered that he had been shot in the Boer War. Mr. Stead was jubilant, and the Materialist was nowhere, when he learned that Piet Botha had been shot in the war. Who in England knew anything about Piet Botha and his death? But the wicked sceptic got to work, and he presently discovered that on November 9, 1899, the Graphic had reproduced a photograph of Piet Botha, who had been shot in the war! A magnificent case fell completely to pieces.
Spirit-drawings and paintings have drawn out just the same ingenuity on the part of the mediums. A favourite and impressive form is to let the sitter choose a blank card and see that it is blank. Then the medium tears off the corner and hands it to the sitter, so that he will recognize his own card at the close. The lights are completely extinguished, the card is laid on the table, and when the gas is re-lit a very fair picture (still wet) in oil is found to have been painted on the card. David Duguid persuaded thousands of people of this marvel in the later decades of the nineteenth century. It was represented that he was merely a cabinet-maker who, in 1866, came under the control of the spirits of certain Dutch painters, and was used by them. I learned long ago in Scotland that the statement that he had never practised drawing or painting was untrue. It is, in any case, probable that he had torn the corners off the little paintings he had prepared in advance, and that it was these corners which he palmed off on the sitter. In the dark he substituted his painting for the blank card, and the corner naturally fitted. The fact that the paint was "still wet" need impress nobody. A touch of varnish easily gives that impression.
Innumerable tricks have been invented by American mediums for fooling the Spiritualist public in this respect, and in many cases it taxes the ingenuity of an expert conjurer to find out where the fraud lay. Mr. Carrington gives a long series of frauds which he has at one time or other studied. One medium offers you an apparently blank sheet of paper, and, although nothing more suspicious than laying it under an innocent-looking blotting-pad can be seen, and there is certainly no substitution, a photograph appears on it while you wait. If you happen to be one of those people whom the medium had had in mind as a possible sitter, or whom he (through an intermediary) induced to come to him, it may be a photograph of your dead son. The photograph was there, invisible, all the time. It had been taken on a special paper (solio paper), and bleached out with bi-chloride of mercury. The blotting-pad was wet with a solution of hypo, and this suffices to restore the photograph.
In other cases the medium, with solemn air, enters his cabinet and draws the curtain. There is a fantastic theory in the Spiritualist world that this cabinet, or cloth-covered frame (like a Punch and Judy show), prevents the "fluid" or force which the medium generates from spreading about the room and being wasted. Nearly all these convenient theories and regulations come from the spirits through the mediums; that is to say, are imposed by the mediums themselves. The closed cabinet, like charity, covers a multitude of sins. In the case of the spirit-painting it may have a trap-door or other outlet, through which the medium hands the blank canvas to a confederate and receives the previously painted picture.
Another medium shows you a blank canvas, and, almost without taking it out of your sight, produces an elegant, and still wet, oil painting on it. The painting was there from the start, of course, but a blank canvas was lightly gummed over it, and all the conjuring the medium had to do was to strip off this blank canvas while your attention was diverted. Mediums know that their sitters are profoundly impressed if the paint is "still wet." I have heard Spiritualists stubbornly maintain that this proves that the painting had only just been done, and done by spirit-power, since no man could do it in so short a time. It is a good illustration of the ease with which they are duped. The picture may have been painted a week or a month before. Rub it with a little poppy oil and you have "wet paint."
Mr. Carrington's Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, one of the richest manuals of mediumistic trickery, has a number of these picture-frauds. A painting is, when thoroughly dry, covered with a solution of water and zinc-white. It is then invisible, and you have "a blank canvas." The picture comes out again by merely washing it with a sponge. In other cases a painting is done in certain chemicals which will remain invisible until a weak solution of tincture of iron is applied; and it may be applied to the back of the canvas. The medium, Carrington suggests, begs the sitters to sing "Nearer, my God, to Thee," to drown the noise, while his confederate creeps behind the canvas and sprays it with the solution. The picture dawns before their astonished eyes.